Apple recalling battery packs

While working on jazz, one of my m68k macs, I needed to find some documentation from apple. So, I went to the Apple support site. Not that I'd expect them to have that information as easily available as I'd like, but there's no harm in trying.

While there, I saw that they're recalling some battery packs for some of their recent laptop models. Since mine is a 12" PowerBook which was bought somewhere near the end of last 2004, and the recall affects 12" and 15" PowerBooks, and 12" iBooks which were sold between October 2004 and May 2005, I went and had a look.

Unfortunately (or perhaps, luckily), my laptop isn't affected by the problem which may cause the battery pack to overheat, so I'm not eligible to a free replacement battery pack. I wouldn't mind getting a free replacement – battery packs wear out, and while the effect isn't really noticeable yet on my laptop, getting a new replacement battery pack after only half a year would've been nice.

In any case, if you have a fairly recent Apple laptop, you may want to check out their information page on the subject and see whether your laptop is affected.

To check the serial number of my battery pack, however, I had to remove the battery pack. Since it's running only on batteries right now, I didn't think it a good idea to just go ahead and remove it; so I printed out the page (or at least intended to), and shut down the thing. Bloody printer starts to spit out page after page, each of which contains only one paragraph from the web page. Ugh. I wasn't sure whether the bug was in CUPS or in Firefox, so I instructed firefox to print the same page to a file. Opening that in ghostscript shows that the bug is most likely in firefox. Only there's a new version of firefox in incoming right now; if that contains the same problem, I'll file a full bugreport.

... Right. And now for fixing jazz